Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms pdfdrive com

Teach the essentials
While I taught in the United States, I found myself gravitating toward inspiring
models of teaching, such as differentiated instruction, Responsive Classroom,
and project-based learning (PBL). As a teacher, each of these approaches offered
me something useful. Differentiated instruction encouraged me to consider the
needs of all of my learners and then how to teach flexibly in order to address
them. Responsive Classroom provided me with a framework for social-
emotional learning, which served as the foundation of my classroom. And PBL
gave me a holistic approach for organizing the curriculum. I considered each of
these methodologies to be exciting and challenging. That being said, the most
demanding model to implement, in my opinion, was PBL.
Different definitions of PBL exist, but I’ll explain how I have come to
understand this interdisciplinary approach to teaching. A PBL unit is typically
organized around the completion of an authentic, high-quality product, which a
teacher and students find interesting and motivating. In my experience, the
product (which may be a class book, a student-directed play, an app, and so on)
is the most important aspect of the unit, because it’s designed to represent and
drive the interdisciplinary learning.
Typically, PBL units are led by science or social studies content, with
reading and writing goals always integrated. In PBL, the idea is to make the
curriculum come to life, where students experience interdisciplinary learning,
service, fieldwork, and visits from experts as they seek to make a meaningful,
high-quality product.
When I started teaching in Finland, I was eager to bring PBL into my
Helsinki classroom. Equipped with my school’s five-hundred-page curriculum
document, I started to plan—beginning in July—a big interdisciplinary unit,
even before I had met my principal and seen my teaching schedule. My idea was
that we’d begin the year with a bang. Unfortunately, I think the opposite
occurred.
In my planning, I titled the PBL unit Pathways to the Olympics, and my idea
was that we’d use the Olympics as an interesting lens for my students to learn
the required history and geography content. In this ten-week unit, I imagined that

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we’d “walk through the centuries” by first investigating the Olympics in a study
of ancient Greece, and then we’d gradually progress to modern history. Once I
had this organizing principle in mind, I recorded which objectives and content
areas we’d specifically address in this PBL unit, based on my school’s
curriculum.
To breathe life into this unit, I invited a Finnish Olympian and her coach into
our classroom. Additionally, before the school year began, I contacted a Finnish
Paralympian, who graciously agreed to work with my students on a possible
service project, in which my class would help raise money for underfunded,
young Finnish Paralympians.
Here’s a lightly edited description I wrote in my unit plan, during the
summer of 2013 (days before I started my teaching stint in Helsinki):
Pathways to the Olympics is specifically designed to develop respect,
student ownership of learning, empathy, the inquiry–learning cycle, and a
culture of high quality in the classroom while learning essential
understandings, knowledge, and skills in geography, history, and English
language arts. Additionally, the students will participate in meaningful
service that will benefit young Paralympians. Fieldwork and visits from
experts will enrich the process of learning.
In project based learning, one or two content areas will often take the
lead; in this case, it’s geography and history. Literacy skills will always
be integrated. What does this mean for science content this year? It
means that science content will lead during the next project. The bottom
line is that all of the content of this year will be engaged by the students.
More than one or two content areas may overlap at times, but not always.
This is done for the sake of achieving deeper learning in each subject.
Students will be knee-deep in writing during this ten-week study.
Keeping a student blog will be something that’s required of every
student. For the first three weeks, we will be doing our blog posts in
school, which means that we will be emphasizing high-quality work.
Additionally, we will be doing other homework assignments (in reading
and math) at school during the first weeks, too.
Although there are many skills that need to be learned in the
beginning of the year, there is a sense of urgency about learning history
content. Creating a class wiki would capture our learning along the way
and encourage the degree in which we engage the content. Since we will
be investigating thousands of years of history, we need ways to track our
walk through the centuries.

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Can you detect the problem(s) in my plan? There are several I’ve found, but
the major one, in my opinion, was the significant number of demanding, novel
initiatives: student blogging, a class wiki, a major fundraising campaign for
Paralympians. I see nothing inherently wrong with any of these ingredients, but
the plan didn’t seem like it was rooted in the essentials of the curriculum, nor, as
I mentioned earlier, was it based on my students’ interests, necessarily.
As I reread my project description, it appears as if I was trying to make the
curriculum serve the activities, not the other way around. I had fallen in love
with my idea of making everything connected to the Olympics. When a teacher
writes “since we will be investigating thousands of years of history” you know
that plan is in deep trouble. In my effort to implement PBL in Finland, I
ultimately failed because I didn’t have a good handle on the contents of my
school’s curriculum.
I think there were several reasons that my PBL unit Pathways to the
Olympics never got off the ground. One major problem was that my plan lacked
focus: I didn’t let the curricular objectives and content lead the unit. My early
flop in Helsinki revealed a weakness in my teaching: I could get distracted by
the auxiliary aspects of planning classroom instruction. During those early
weeks of school, for example, I spent a significant amount of time arranging
inspirational visits from Olympians and Paralympians, launching student
blogging, and fretting about fundraising for a young Paralympic team. Those
weren’t essential tasks.
With an American teaching schedule in the Boston area, where I had
significantly more instructional time each week, this problem of getting
distracted in my planning was never apparent to me. I could afford to keep my
units and lessons a little loose around the edges. Sure, I’d always aim to teach
the essentials, but I think often I didn’t plan as efficiently as I could have.
In Finland, where I had much less time with my students, there just wasn’t
time to maintain loose connections to content and objectives in my classroom. I
needed to prepare tighter units and tighter lessons. It wasn’t my ideal way of
planning, but the limited hours of instruction demanded it. That new
environment pushed me to put the auxiliary aspects of planning where they
belong—in a supporting role. That first year of teaching in Helsinki, I had
certain subjects with my fifth graders where we’d meet only once each week for
forty-five minutes: biology and geography, chemistry and physics, and ethics.
Also, I felt squeezed in math, because we had only three forty-five-minute
periods. Honestly, I felt pinched for time in every subject I taught.
When I first started teaching in Finland, I found this lighter schedule to be a
blessing and a curse. It was wonderful to have more time to plan and collaborate

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with colleagues, but it was also a curse to have less time to teach my students. In
Helsinki, my Finnish colleagues helped me to conceive of planning in a different
way, to focus on teaching the essentials. Given that lessons in several subjects
were in short supply, I found that my fellow teachers were adept at budgeting
lessons. In my experience planning with them, I’d sometimes hear them talk
about the number of remaining lessons in a term, and then plan backward, with
the curriculum and materials close at hand.
Through observing Finnish classrooms, I’ve found that Finland’s most
popular methods of promoting mastery in the classroom aren’t exactly cutting
edge. Contrary to what I initially expected, Finland’s teachers typically employ
traditional, teacher-directed classroom instruction.
As one of my Finnish colleagues informed me during my first year of
teaching in Helsinki, textbooks are a tradition in Finland’s schools. Even
Finland’s first graders, typically, spend a significant amount of classroom time
completing exercises from workbooks in different subjects. In my dozens of
hours of observing classrooms throughout Finland, I’d often see textbooks,
lecturing, and students copying text off the blackboard (or whiteboard) into their
notebooks. This “on the ground” picture of classroom instruction in Finland
didn’t match the glowing image represented by the international media—and,
initially, I didn’t know what to make of this finding.
One of the reasons that Finnish teachers seem to embrace textbooks, I’ve
deduced, is that those materials help them to pace their units and their lessons.
It’s common, I’ve found, for the chapters of Finnish textbooks to correspond
with the number of lessons in a particular subject. For example, if there are
thirty-six lessons of history in a school year, it’s reasonable to expect to find
thirty-six chapters in that subject’s textbook.
This notion that Finland’s teachers keep their classroom instruction fairly
rigid may seem paradoxical, given the reputation that they have for having so
much freedom in their work. But I think it’s this characteristic that gives them
stability in their day-to-day efforts, allowing them and their students to master
content areas.
For years, I’ve been seeking to improve as a teacher, but I admit that it’s
only recently that I’ve felt much more focused in my instructional planning.
With this strategy, teach the essentials, I’m not suggesting that teachers abandon
student-centered practices for teacher-directed practices. Instead, I’m
recommending that we adopt a healthy sense of urgency in our planning, in an
effort to prioritize the essentials, based on the curricula.
In Finland, once I started reallocating my planning time by aligning my
lesson plans and units more closely with the curriculum, I found that it was

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easier for my students to achieve mastery in our classroom. They needed me to
prioritize the essentials in our classroom and not get distracted by auxiliary
aspects of teaching, such as inviting Olympians and launching student blogging.
One of the best ways to stay focused, I’ve found, is through a practice I call mine